The Diablo 3 Year in Review: September 2009

Posted By: January 6, 2010

After the Blizzcon-filled joys of August, it was inevitable that September would be something of a letdown. The month was devoid of D3 interviews (though there were a couple with other Blizzard personnel), and most of the best info came in the form of ongoing Blizzcon info presentations. Thankfully Bashiok made a decent number of forum posts, to keep us all from utter despair.

September 2009

The first interesting news of the month came on the 2nd, when Bashiok made some lengthy forum posts on Bind of Pickup and Bind on Equip items. His words kicked up a minor controversy, unintentionally, when his comments about how some quest items are BoP (since your character can’t finish the quest if they lose the item) were misinterpreted. But in the end things were resolved and everyone went out for orange smoothies together.

The 3rd brought another reoccurrence of the never-ending Art Controversy, when some fans who didn’t like the look of things in the Act 2, Blizzcon 2009 gameplay movie, released screenshots from the movie with detailed commentary on what was wrong with them. Bashiok, likely spurred on by comments from the game artists, didn’t take kindly to this, and he replied with an almost point-by-point rebuttal. Most of the fans appeared to agree with his points, judging by the comments on the news post.

Speaking of never-ending, the 3rd brought an announcement about the ever-delayed v1.13 patch. Work was officially commencing on it! The rest of the month and October would bring delays and more delays, naturally.

Another never-ending issue popped up on the 4th, with Bashiok tackling the issue of auto-assigned attributes.

Those post-Blizzcon blues were soothed for a few days by another convention in early September; the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, September 4-6. Diablo 3 was present in playable form at the show, and generated a fair amount of media coverage, as well as ninja video recordings. Links to the dozen or so appropriate news posts and previews can be accessed from the Media Coverage page.

September 7th brought confirmation (if any was needed?) that Leah would indeed be an NPC seen in the game. Since she’d already been seen in a previous screenshot!

On September 15th, infamous Activision/Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick threw cold water all over the gaming community with some comments about his management strategy at Activision; one he would no doubt enjoy extending to Blizzard. His efforts to “take the fun out of” developing video games struck a very ill chord with most gamers, but of course they werent’ directed to gamers. They were directed to shareholders during a financial conference, and were (presumably) just what those would-be investors wanted to hear.

The middle part of the month brought several post-Blizzcon info bursts, chiefly in the form of lengthy articles about D3’s game controls and inventory, quests, and bosses. Check those out if you missed them, as they all cover info not released in any other Blizzcon preview or hands-on reports.

The 23rd brought some very interesting videos of Blizzard’s Diablo 3 presentation at Digital Taipei 2009. Jay Wilson headed up the presentation, and the movies show him talking about numerous key game features, largely recreating/updating panels from the past two Blizzcons.

The last key info tidbit of the month came on the 28th, when Bashiok dropped into a thread about skill runes, and explained that skill runes can do a lot of things; more than fans are envisioning now. For instance, they could lessen the cool down time between skill uses, making a skill like Teleport, with a seemingly-endless 9 second delay at Rank 1, much more usable.